Marc Gregoire’s Blog

On 21st of June I went to the Kulendayz 2008 which is the first regional community conference organized by the Microsoft Community Osijek together with Microsoft Croatia with support from INETA and Hupro. Since I’m living in Croatia at the moment and the Kulendayz location was only 30 minutes from my place, it was pretty easy for me to get there.

In the morning I went to a scrum presentation and to a session about advanced debugging of ASP.NET applications using windbg.
In the afternoon I went to a unified communications presentation, explaining the Office Communications Server.

The last presentation I went to was about concurrent/parallel programming in C#. This was one of the most interesting presentations for me (by Bernard Katic). It explained how to optimize code for running on multicore processors, which is becoming more and more important with the release of Quad-Core processors and Octo-Core and even 80-core processors in the pipeline. The session was focussed on the Parallel FX Library and Parallel LINQ. The Parallel FX Library allows you to easily “parallelize” certain parts of your application like for loops. Parallel LINQ allows you to do the same with your LINQ queries. There is an interesting article on MSDN called “Optimize Managed Code For Multi-Core Machines” that expains the Parallel FX Library with clear and simple examples.

It was interesting to find out that I was not the only belgian on the conference. Arlindo Alves from Microsoft Belgium was also there giving a presentation on Microsoft Hyper-V.

I just received my generic “to whom it may concern” letter of recognition from Microsoft concerning my MVP 2008 award. I have attached it after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

The Windows XP Service Pack 3 was released a week ago, however it had a compatibility issue with Microsoft Dynamic RMS. Because of this, the service pack was brought offline again.

Now Microsoft has fixed the issue and SP3 is again available for download. The Dynamic RMS issue is solved with a hotfix. The recommended way of installing SP3 is by using Windows Update, which will download only what you need, saving bandwidth. That way it’s typically around 70 MB.

If you need to install SP3 on multiple machines, you can download an installation package which is around 316 MB. If you are running Microsoft Dynamic RMS, it is recommended to first install the Dynamic RMS hotfix from here.  SP3 can be downloaded from here.

SP3 contains more than 1000 hotfixes and patches. Some new features are also included but which according to Microsoft “do not significantly change customers’ experience with the operating system”.

I finally found some time to post a few pictures of the Microsoft MVP Global Summit 2008 in Seattle. The summit was great. There were 1753 MVPs from all over the world attending the summit. The sessions given by Microsoft product groups were very interesting. I went to all the Visual C++ sessions and it was great to hear the direction in which they are going with the product. One thing they made perfectly clear is that MFC is not dead They are putting interesting new things in upcoming versions of MFC which allow you to create modern user interfaces for your MFC applications. One such thing is the ribon bar which is part of the MFC Feature Pack for Visual Studio 2008. Below you can see some pictures taken during the summit. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday April 1st (not an april fools ), I got an email from Microsoft saying that I got the Microsoft MVP Visual C++ Award for 2008. MVP stands for Most Valuable Professional.

 See my MVP profile.

On the same topic, I’m also looking forward to the Microsoft Global MVP Summit in Seattle. This is a 4 day gathering of MVPs from all over the world and starts on 14th of April. It will be a great time to get to know some fellow MVPs.

I was trying to port a screensaver from Visual Studio 2005 to Visual Studio 2008.

After loading the project in VS2008, compilation went without any problems. However, when I tried to test the screensaver on a Windows XP box I got the error message that the function ChangeWindowMessageFilter could not be found in user32.dll. The first thing I did was to open the MSDN and search for this ChangeWindowMessageFilter function. According to the documentation ChangeWindowMessageFilter is only available on Windows Vista. I obviously didn’t use that function myself otherwise I would have known about it in the first place So I checked the libraries that I was linking to. The most obvious candidate would be the ScrnSave.lib library. I searched for it and it was linking to the version that was installed by Visual Studio 2008 in C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.0A\Lib. To make sure I did a “dumpbin /symbols ScrnSave.Lib” on it and it was indeed using the ChangeWindowMessageFilter function.

It is pretty strange that this ScrnSave.Lib is dependent on a Vista API call. This just annoys developers that try to create a screensaver that still works on Windows XP. It should be pretty easy for the developers of ScrnSave.Lib to dynamically load the user32.dll and see if ChangeWindowMessageFilter is available.

Anyway, the easiest and quickest workaround that I’m using right now is to use the ScrnSave.Lib from the Visual Studio 2005 installation. After recompiling my screensaver with this older library it works again on Windows XP.

Microsoft released Windows Vista Service Pack 1 on March 18 in English, French, Spanish, German, and Japanese. You can get it from Windows Update or the Microsoft Download Center. In April, Windows Update will begin to download SP1 automatically but will only install it after explicit agreement of the user. In April, SP1 will also be available in the remaining 31 languages.

On some systems Windows Vista Service Pack 1 might not be available for installation from Windows Update and might not be offered by Automatic Updates. This can have several causes. If this is happening for you, check KB948343.

A list of all changes/fixes in SP1 can be found here.

The Microsoft Visual Studio Ecosystem team has officially launched the new Visual Studio Gallery site at http://visualstudiogallery.com/. This new web site is a resource center for all Visual Studio extensions and includes everything from free VS PowerToys like tools to VSIP products. Any developer can post information and a link for their Visual Studio extensions. The goal for this website is to give developers an easy way to find extensions for Visual Studio. Visual Studio extensions might include products and free applications in the form of macros, add-ins, packages, project templates, or other types of extensions to Visual Studio that are packaged up and ready to use by the developer to improve their development experience.

See also the announcement on the VSX Team Blog.

Maybe a bit late, but for those who missed the announcement, Microsoft has released a beta of the Visual C++ 2008 Feature Pack.

The Visual C++ 2008 Feature Pack extends the VC++ Libraries shipped with Visual Studio 2008.New MFC features include:

• Office Ribbon style interface
• Office 2007, Office 2003 and Office XP look and feel
• Modern Visual Studio-style docking toolbars and panes
• Fully customizable toolbars and menus
• A rich set of advanced GUI controls
• Advanced MDI tabs and groups
• And much more!

This feature pack also includes an implementation of TR1. Portions of TR1 are scheduled for adoption in the upcoming C++0x standard as the first major addition to the ISO 2003 standard C++ library. The following feature are currently supported:

• Smart pointers
• Regular expression parsing
• New containers (tuple, array, unordered set, etc)
• Sophisticated random number generators
• Polymorphic function wrappers
• Type traits
• And more!

Note: This feature pack does not include C99 compatibility or support for special math functions.

Download the beta.

Microsoft TechDays are the new Microsoft Developer & IT Pro Days. TechDays 2008 will be held in Ghent (Belgium) on March 12 and 13. March 11 is the official launch of brand new versions of Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008 in Belgium & Luxembourg.

The following speakers will be on the TechDays 2008:

• Scott Schnoll, Microsoft Corporation
• Ward Ralston, Microsoft Corporation
• Tony Krijnen, Microsoft Netherlands
• Dandy Weyn, Microsoft Corporation
• Kurt Roggen, Guidance
• Jan De Clercq, HP
• and more…

If you are interested in this event or want more information, just click the banner below.